Lionel Shriver has called her fellow novelist Kamila Shamsie’s suggestion of a year publishing only women “rubbish”.

Shamsie made the provocative call last year, citing gender imbalances across literary prizes, reviews, World Book Night author selections, and even protagonists in award-winning novels. “I would argue that is time for everyone, male and female, to sign up to a concerted campaign to redress the inequality,” Shamsie wrote. “Why not have a Year of Publishing Women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the UK, seems appropriate … The basic premise of my ‘provocation’ is that none of the new titles published in that year should be written by men.”

But Shriver, speaking on a panel to mark International Women’s Day, described the proposal as “rubbish … This whole thing of treating women specially, as if they need special help and special rules, is problematic and obviously backfires,” she said.

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Shriver compared it to the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which she won in 2005 for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin when it was known as the Orange prize. “It is not as meaningful to me to have won the Orange prize as, say, it would have been to win the Booker. Most people who win that prize surely say the same thing: you have eliminated half the human race from applying,” said Shriver, the Bookseller reported. “But there is this problem of suggesting that we need help, that men have to leave the room and then we’re prizeworthy. The idea of only publishing women is the same thing.”

Her fellow panellist Sarah Churchwell, professor in American literature at the University of London, said she disagreed with Shriver about International Women’s Day and the Baileys Prize. “I believe both are necessary because we have not yet achieved equality. When we do achieve equality then it will be nice to have a world in which those are not necessary,” she told the Guardian.

At the event, Churchwell said that “equality is precisely the fight for not having special treatment – even if that special treatment is couched as, as it is with women, preferential treatment, but said “you can’t win by pretending gender isn’t a problem, either. You just get back into a state where it’s invisible and what women think and experience gets lost all over again.”

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Shamsie told the Guardian that, while Shriver “might genuinely think the Year of Publishing Women is ‘rubbish’, she’s clearly also being an agent provocateur, which is a role I think far too few people are willing to inhabit.

“And it’s very useful, because it resurrects a discussion around gender and publishing which I think we need to keep having – look at the longlist for the Man Booker International – a wonderful list but as one of the judges, Tahmima Anam, points out in today’s Guardian article, the gender imbalance there reflects what a small percentage of translated fiction is written by women.”

Shamsie said it was “certainly worth thinking about Sarah Churchwell’s point that ‘special treatment’ comes with its own problems - that’s absolutely true if there are too many iterations of it”.

Any female writer in her right mind would rather win, for example, the Booker, because it’s more meaningful

Lionel Shriver

“The Orange/Women’s prize for fiction has been wonderful – and I genuinely think it’s played a role in the increased number of women on prize lists … But we don’t need two women’s prizes for fiction in the UK,” Shamsie said. “The Year of Publishing Women was precisely an attempt to think of how an industry that is in many ways female-dominated might look at its own biases via a dramatic but time-limited proposal. A shock to the system, in the hopes that might reboot some ingrained ideas, rather than an ongoing process ... Interesting, isn’t it, how worked up people can get about a proposal that only spans 12 months? “

Speaking to the Guardian on Thursday, Shriver said she had “always been a supporter of the [Orange] prize, but that any female writer in her right mind would rather win, for example, the Booker, because it’s more meaningful.

“It’s not a meaningless experience, winning the prize – it does have an effect on your career, and it’s a very well-run, well-regarded award. But it’s still a women’s prize,” she said.

But she remained clear that the concept of a Year of Publishing Women was “a ridiculous idea … This whole bend-over-backwards business backfires, because the implication is that women need special treatment,” she said. “I’m more interested in a core cultural prejudice which is very hard to shift.”

At small translated fiction publisher Tilted Axis Press, however, founder Deborah Smith said she would be publishing all women this year, and was likely to publish only women writers in 2018 as well.

In parts of the world women are treated like property … in comparison, women being reviewed less often is small beer

Lionel Shriver

“The biggest problem with Lionel Shriver’s dismissive comments regarding a Year of Publishing Women is her failure to acknowledge that as a white American, writing in English, living in London, holding an MFA from Columbia, she is in a vastly more privileged position than the majority of women writers. As Kamila herself said in her original provocation, it’s important to ‘ensure that the YPW doesn’t end up looking like the year of publishing young, straight, white, middle-class metropolitan women’,” said Smith.

“If it really was just a case of ‘let’s publish more women – any women, purely because they’re women’, that would be as simplistic and unhelpful as Shriver suggests. But, of course, it’s not. It’s about recognising the various biases, often near-invisible, which mean writing by women is less likely to make it through into English, and, when it does, to be accorded the same reception (quality and quantity) as similar work by men.”

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Editor Tara Tobler at And Other Stories said the independent publisher was also still committed to publishing only women in 2018, with 10 female authors lined up for that year. She pointed to statistics showing that in 2014, just 19% of titles in English translation were by women authors translated by women, and 13% were by women authors translated by men. “We’re looking at this not just as a publisher of UK writing but of writing from around the world. It’s about finding more female writers or translators from countries where there are gender biases far greater than there are here,” she said.

Shriver said that while she personally cared about the issue “because I am a fiction writer and this is my job”, it was “a very small issue in comparison to a lot of other countries’ concerns. In Saudi Arabia women can’t drive. In the Middle East and parts of Africa women are treated like property and have trouble getting an education. Female genital mutilation is a big issue. So in comparison, women being less likely to be reviewed is small beer.”